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February 16 - July 6, 2021
But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.
In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.
Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.
This is not a simple misunderstanding.
the seemingly neutral “evangelical distinctives” turn out to be culturally and racially specific.
and which should be shunned.
Cancel culture much?
What they didn’t realize was that they were up against a more powerful system of authority—an evangelical popular culture that reflected and reinforced a compelling ideology and a coherent worldview. A few words preached on Sunday morning did little to disrupt the steady diet of religious products evangelicals consumed day in, day out.
it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.
Offering certainty in times of social change, promising security in the face of global threats, and, perhaps most critically, affirming the righteousness of a white Christian America and, by extension, of white Christian Americans, conservative evangelicals succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of large numbers of American Christians. They achieved this dominance not only by crafting a compelling ideology but also by advancing their agenda through strategic organizations and political alliances, on occasion by way of ruthless displays of power, and, critically, by dominating the production
...more
??? Show your work
The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.
Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues.
As opposed to or rather in line with “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”
reassertion of white patriarchy was central to the new “family values” politics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.
but this expansive media network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals created and maintained their own identity—
Generations of evangelicals learned to be afraid of communists, feminists, liberals, secular humanists, “the homosexuals,” the United Nations, the government, Muslims, and immigrants—and they were primed to respond to those fears by looking to a strong man to rescue them from danger, a man who embodied a God-given, testosterone-driven masculinity.
It is, rather, a historical and a cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their own power.
Such cultural disdain only served to enhance fundamentalists’ perception of themselves as an embattled, faithful remnant.
How familiar
When Graham arrived in LA, the little-known thirty-three-year-old revivalist caught the eye of Stuart Hamblen, the hard-drinking “cowboy singer.” One of Hamblen’s biggest hits, “(I Won’t Go Huntin’, Jake) But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women,”
How Bieber-like...
Signifying an earlier era of American manhood, a time when heroic (white) men enforced order, protected the vulnerable, and wielded their power without apology, the myth of the American cowboy had been tinged with nostalgia from
Except that never really existed... even at the time, it was the construction of media.
Contemporary evangelical partisanship can only be understood in terms of a broader realignment that transformed partisan politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, a realignment that evangelicals themselves helped bring about.
Understanding this ambivalence toward civil rights within white evangelicalism is key to understanding the role that race would play within evangelical politics more generally.
In the wake of Brown, for example, many southerners turned to private Christian academies to maintain segregation, and when the tax-exempt status of these “segregation academies” was revoked in 1970, evangelicals defended their right to whites-only schools
Invariably, however, the heroic Christian man was a white man, and not infrequently a white man who defended against the threat of nonwhite men and foreigners.
Goldwater wasn’t known for his religious beliefs, but that wasn’t really the point. He was bringing a message Sunbelt evangelicals wanted to hear.13
THE ANTIWAR LEFT, though often disparaged by evangelicals, was in fact animated in part by religious faith.
The Alamo (1960) was inspired by Wayne’s Cold War activism in the late 1940s; Davy Crockett’s sacrifice for the cause of liberty offered a heroic model for Cold War America.
Still does... see TX school curricula all the way through college
Wayne’s crassness was part of his appeal, if not the key to it—and this would become a pattern among evangelical heroes, religious and secular.
The Total Woman offered Christians a model of femininity, but it also presented, along the way, a model of masculinity. To be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido. Men were entitled to lead, to rule, and to have their needs met—all their needs, on their terms.
Women who chose “traditional womanhood” didn’t always do so because they wanted an easier path, however; many believed it to be the better path.
Interesting to note on discoveries about the Elliots in recent years...
Conservative women across the nation rose up to defend their place in the world, to protect a way of life that depended on gender difference—on the provision and protection God had ordained for them.17
And racial difference
it reveals that conservative Christian anti-feminism in the 1970s was intimately connected to a larger set of political issues—to anticommunism, Christian nationalism, and militarism, among others.
Racial anxieties also surfaced in their rhetoric around “the potty issue.”
Sounds like trans rights issues rhetoric
transgender people and bathrooms in our own time.22
Yup
When family conflicts proved irresolvable, IBLP offered to institutionalize children until their attitudes and behaviors were rectified. In submission to Gothard’s authority, parents entrusted their problem children to IBLP institutions, sometimes for months at a time.3
the closed system of authority, and the enforced submission of women and children created a climate ripe for abuse.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has proposed that competing metaphors of the family constitute a key divide in modern society.
At its most basic level, family values politics was about sex and power.
You couldn’t have a man’s “aggressive leadership” without his aggressive sex drive, and women who resented the latter
Very telling why Trump would be forgiven or even praised for infidelities and lecherous acyions and language
the captain of his high school football team,
How many of these jock leaders would have led with fully integrated sports?
Falwell only changed his tune on political engagement when he deemed it necessary to preserve the rights of segregationists and fend off a secularist assault.
“but we really didn’t have a choice.”
Sounds familiar
He ran as a tough-on-crime candidate, and for conservatives, “tough on crime” generally connoted only certain types of crime: “street crime,” or the threat of black men. Domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse didn’t register.
For both, the ends justified the means.
America was great
For whom?
and by this point, to be sure, the two groups were not mutually exclusive.
“At stake is whether the White House will become a public relations vehicle for lying and polling, akin to a television show, or will remain a platform for the principled articulation of policies and values that Americans respect.”
LOL LOL LOL
“whether we are going to allow the president to get by with flouting the law and lying about it on television, while hiding behind his popularity in the polls.”
Haha
professional liars occupying the White House.”
Yup
McCartney himself conceded that the focus on race was “a major factor in the significant fall-off” in attendance—it was “simply a hard teaching for many.”
Wow... just wow. That’s A way of putting it.
Roger Olson, a Baptist theologian who opposed the Calvinist insurgency, compared the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement to Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts seminar, observing that there was “a certain kind of personality that craves the comfort of absolute certainty as an escape from ambiguity and risk and they find it in religion or politics of a certain kind.”
Must be sad when Olson is the moderate.
Most foundationally, they were united in a mutual commitment to patriarchal power.33
